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I went to Portland Harbour to see the results of the harbour trials of the UK Energy Technologies Institute funded marine Monitoring Measurement and Verification (MMV) system which has been developed for CO 2 storage site surveillance. This has a strong emphasis on the utilisation of AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles – now famous from "Boaty McB...

The STEMM-CCS project held its first annual meeting last week. This is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project that will develop and test environmental monitoring at a controlled release of CO 2 in the North Sea. The project is coordinated by The UK's National Oceanography Centre, with a consortium of partners representing the leading marine science orga...

​ Globally, the pulp and paper (P&P) industry is the fifth largest industrial source of CO 2 emissions. Recently, the Paris Agreement has highlighted the target of achieving below 1.5oC temperature rise. In order to achieve this goal, bio-CCS has an important role to play to achieve this target. In a pulp mill, the CO 2 emissions arise mainly f...

  It is pleasing to see that Ladybird Books (which publishes mass-market children's books) has published a title on Climate Change which has been co-authored by HRH the Prince of Wales. The book, Climate Change, provides a short-format guide to the key scientific facts central to climate change. It explains the history, dangers and challenges ...

​ CO 2 capture from natural gas (NG) can be done by several technologies, e.g. solvent scrubbing, membranes, adsorption or cryogenic processes. The future demand in NG might trigger development of NG fields with high CO 2 partial pressure, for which pressure swing adsorption (PSA) processes could be more suitable than the other options. Besides, PS...

​ Overall good progress is being made with the experience gained in both monitoring and modelling from demonstration and pilot projects. There is real progress in streamlining MMV at projects and reducing the costs of monitoring. Several sites have now demonstrated conformance of a modelling-monitoring loop, leading to an improvement in the underst...

​ The Early Career Researcher Winter School held at the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training took place last week and with thanks to the UKCCSRC I was able to attend. It was a busy week with 7 keynote speakers covering topics including geological storage, the current status of CCS both internationally and in the UK, the economics and financing of pro...

The 7th Korea CCUS conference was held on Jeju island on 8-10th February. This annual conference brings together all the CCUS R&D in Korea. This is a respectably-sized conference, a total number of around 300 attended over the three days to hear presentations (in English) in three parallel streams: capture; storage; and CO 2 conversion; plus so...

  The effectiveness of CCS as a global solution to carbon emission abatement will depend on widespread deployment in both established industrialised and developing economies. One of the key stages for any country is the identification of a national CO 2 storage resource. To help understand the challenges faced by different countries that have ...

​ Review of CO 2 storage in basalts – new technical review from IEAGHG on the potential of using basalts and other magnesium rich rocks to store CO 2 . Conventional CO 2 storage relies on injection into a reservoir in sedimentary rock which has an impermeable caprock. It is also possible to trap CO 2 in igneous rock formations with high magnesium, ...

CO 2 storage has now been tested at a number of demonstration sites around the world, including some depleted oil and gas reservoirs. The use of depleted reservoirs can offer some advantages because the geological characteristics that are pertinent to CO 2 storage, such as the distribution of porosity and permeability, have been pre-determined. Alt...

​ I like to watch the weather in a morning on BBC news to start the day. These days we regularly get images of the flow of the jet stream and I have been amazed by how much it varies, wobbling around the upper region of the globe. This morning we were told that the jet stream was bringing high winds to the UK and planes coming from the USA will be ...

Andy Boston from the Energy Research Partnership in the UK has written a great article that presses on an issue that has concerned me for some time, the use of the levelised costs of electricity (LCOE) to compare low carbon technologies. In his article "the levelised cost of fruit" see http://erpuk.org/levelised-cost-fruit/ he dismisses the use of ...

​ A new report entitled The Arctic Resilience Report (see https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047 ) indicates that temperatures in the Arctic are currently about 200C above what would be expected for the time of year and that sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year. One concern highlighted by the report is...

  This was a lively well attended panel discussion which certainly sparked a lot of debate. My takeaways from this were: CO 2 utilisation and conversion to chemicals is a hot topic in many countries, with many Governments funding research programmes To meet the below 2 0 C target set at COP22 we need mitigation options that permanently remove ...

As GHGT-13 drew so many from the CCS world together in one place for a week it is not surprising that many take advantage to organise launch events there. Two involved the launch of projects' datasets for wider use by the CCS community, one deep-focussed, one shallow-focussed. One was organised by Geoscience Australia and CO 2 CRC to launch their r...

  A Discussion Panel was organised to celebrate the 20 years of successful injection by Statoil at Sleipner, and how best to transfer knowledge globally. Statoil have been doing a good job over the years of sharing their seismic data (via IEAGHG) and other monitoring results at IEAGHG and other meetings, with very many papers published also. S...

  USDOE's John Litynski chaired an absorbing session on "Large-Scale Carbon Capture Pilots" that certainly seemed to strike a chord. Several speakers provided the audience with the benefit of their extensive practical experience of managing or operating capture pilots at the 10+ MWe scale. They described how testing often progressed through tw...

In his keynote speech, "Too late for 2°C?", Thomas Stocker, eminent environmental scientist from the University of Bern, made the very clear case for urgent action if the most damaging effects of climate change were to be averted. The IEA projects that we must aim for power sector emissions of less than 40 gCO 2 /kWh by 2050 if we are to have a rea...

At the Site Characterisation session of GHGT-13, Nick Hoffman demonstrated how the CarbonNet project managed to design their plume mapping approach to successfully meet regulatory requirements. A prediction of plume paths with more than a 10% probability of occurrence are required by Australian GHG storage regulations. The probabilistic modelling a...